What I thought was mild illness last week ratcheted up into upper respiratory distress. None of us ever had a fever, so I'm guessing it's just a virus and not influenza. I haven't gotten over it as quickly as my son and husband did. I'm at day 11 so far. 🙁 I'm blaming it on my potentially still recovering from Covid in August/September. As a result, I haven't gotten as much done as I would have liked.
We are attending a wedding this weekend that has a dress code. Since I generally can't find ready-to-wear things that fit properly, I am making a mashup of Cashmerette's Mercier jumpsuit and Grafton dress. I am using the wrap bodice from the Mercier and the long sleeves and circle skirt from the Grafton (instructions are given in the Mercier for how to do this). I did finish making my toile last week. It was surprisingly not that bad, though there is definitely room for improvement. For my sample, I am using a jersey sheet from Walmart and I cut out short sleeves from the Mercier just to see how the bodice would fit. I basted everything and didn't fully sew some of it, just enough to be able to get a gauge on fit. And somehow I managed to cut my two skirt panels (A-line for this version) at two different sizes.
The front is not too bad. It fits better than what I can find locally in ready-to-wear. I will probably need to add a snap to hold it closed a bit higher up for the wedding.
The back is kind of tragic. Rounded back inherited from my dad strikes again. And I'm glad I'm making long sleeves because my arms are rather fleshy these days (thanks, Mom). 😔
I did reach out to Cashmerette for advice. Carrie helped me and she agreed that I needed to shorten the bodice. It seemed okay when I was wearing it, but I could see in the pictures that the waist looked too low for how the pattern is supposed to fit. I wasn't entirely sure what to do with the back. I know how to alter a woven with a back seam, but didn't know how that translated to a knit with no back seam. She suggested a high round back adjustment. My roundness is concentrated at a low round position, so reviewing my Palmer Pletsch, the Cashmerette blog, plus a lot of other reference books and videos, I might split the difference between high round back and low round back.
I need to move the dart. That one, at least, is an easy alteration.
So I need to make a new bodice to test out the alterations and then make the entire final dress in the good fabric before Saturday afternoon. Good grief! And did I mention I don't have thread to match my final dress?
And all I really want to do is work on a quilt. But just think, once I get the dress done, I'll have completed 12 items from my PHD list and then all I have to do is finish off my work quilts for the year. Then I can work on whatever else I want!
I did finish my little chicken cross stitch.
Moving over into the longarm realm, we decided that the hook replacement in Lucey 1 needed to happen over the weekend. It took two tries to get it timed to everyone's satisfaction. Or so I thought. I loaded a quilt, tried to baste, and had skipped stitches and frayed thread. Ugh. Still in progress.
I am falling behind, but I did get a few quilts done.
I quilted Basic Swirl on Carol T.'s quilt.
Melissa requested Star Spangled Banner for this one.
I also bound it.
I quilted Midnight Sparkle on Cindy's quilt.
And Loops and Swirls on Cindy's other quilt.
The weather was nice over the weekend though we woke up to frost each morning. We've planted the remaining bulbs and transplanted a chunk of sweet spire from one garden to another. We cleaned out the vegetable garden. There were quite a few peppers/coolapenos and a small amount of green beans.
I was bringing food to the chickens and noticed their water was low. As I leaned down to refill the water, I noticed an egg on the ground under the waterer. Hey! Who laid this? And why is it outside instead of up in the coop?
We think maybe it was one of the Barred Rocks, but really, no idea. I did check everywhere else in their garden and run to make sure there weren't any other eggs lurking.
The only other thing of note right now is that we placed an order for a new car. It's scheduled to be built on November 27. I have no idea how long it takes after that to arrive. I'm not looking forward to having car payments, but it was time. My Highlander is a 2011 and has almost 191,000 miles on it. The new one, a RAV-4, will be hybrid. Technology has changed a lot in the last 15 years, so this will be a big change.
The time change has been relatively easy for me. The only exception is that most nights we end up doing our walk in the dark. One night we made it out for twilight. We thought this sycamore tree's leaf-loss pattern was interesting.
No comments